Annie Sandrussi

In response to Shawn Loht’s 2017 project delineating a Heideggerian phenomenology of film, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, I examine how productive Loht’s Dasein-centric account of the film viewer might be for considering diverse film-viewer experiences. Starting from Loht’s premise that the film–viewer relation is the constitutive ground of filmic disclosure, I raise two concerns regarding Heidegger’s account of Dasein that might obscure an account of the diversity of film viewers and associated heterogeneity of filmic disclosure: Dasein’s lack of concreteness with respect to lived experience, and Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment and bodily difference. I firstly argue that Dasein’s lack of concreteness is productive for theorising the diversity of film viewers by discussing the concept of Dasein through formal indication, a Heideggerian notion that Loht draws upon in order to account for filmic disclosure. I then examine a key objection, that Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment limits the productivity of a Dasein-centric account of film viewers for theorising diversity. I refer to Katharina Lindner’s interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world in a queer phenomenology of film, set out in “Questions of Embodied Difference: Film and Queer Phenomenology” (2012), to suggest a pathway for how Dasein’s being-in-the-world might offer an account of film viewing that takes into consideration the embodiment of diverse viewers.

The problem of empathy has been typically founded on subjectivist theories of human being. Empathy was adopted into philosophy by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who interpreted it as the solution to the problem of the foreign ego. Among phenomenologists, whose discipline is foundational to the concept of empathy, there is contention about the notion of empathy as an account of human being with one another. The 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger was particularly critical of the basis of the problem of empathy, because of its foundations on a supposed misrepresentation of human selfhood. The very problem of empathy is a central motif in phenomenology because it seeks to address the peculiar immediacy of the knowledge of other minds, as distinct but alike entities; yet, empathy is met with challenges particular to a subject-oriented framework, where there is posited to be the private, inner psychical life of the Self that is distinct from the Other. This chapter suggests that the notion of empathy is better based on approaches to human selfhood that by-pass the traditional subject-object binary. Specifically, I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to overcome ego theories of the self provides an ideal framework for positing empathy as a phenomenon of interpersonal understanding. This is juxtaposed against Husserl’s notion of empathy as constitutive of the relation of egos. I argue that Heidegger’s notion of the Self as arising out of everyday human ‘Being-with’ (Mitsein) renders obsolete the problem of empathy as it has been typically posed, so that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (‘Being-there’) allows thinking about the formation of selfhood as a reciprocal and communal process and thus overcomes the solipsistic challenges to interpersonal understanding.